iJustine Just Released Her First Ever 360-Degree YouTube Video

The future has arrived.

For the past ten years, Justine Ezarik — aka iJustine — has been a pioneer in video blogging. With nearly 2.7 million subscribers, a Webby, and a Streamy, she’s always looking for new ways to engage with her fans. Now, she’s one of the first vloggers to embrace the ability to produce virtual reality content for YouTube. Today, her first 360-degree video, Full Circle, went live. In the video, Justine talks about how she became a vlogger, while giving viewers an immersive tour of her favorite places in Santa Monica, CA. The 360-degree “full circle” footage allows fans to explore the different locations she visits — like the beach and the pier — by tilting their phone or scrolling with their trackpad.

“Sometimes you plan things and it doesn’t go the way you planned, and for me, I’m always open to alternate paths,” Justine tells Teen Vogue. “If I were to stick to the path that I planned on back in the day, I would just be doing graphic design — I love graphic design, but now I get to do it on a huge scale [as a vlogger].” With 360-degree footage, Justine offers her audience the chance to take these “alternate paths” within the world of her video, so no two viewers will experience the content the same way.

In March 2015, YouTube announced the launch of the 360-degree video option, but until now, immersive video was considered a novelty reserved for news outlets like The Washington Post, tech companies like GoPro, and consumer brands like Red Bull. "The problem for the past few years in virtual reality was that the headsets were hard to get, they were expensive, and you could only have them if you were a developer,” Justine explains. “But now, consumers are able to get their hands on them and doing things like YouTube 360, I think people are really getting to experience content in a whole new way.” It’s also a new challenge for vloggers to produce immersive footage, because now, they have be conscious of so much more during production. To produce Full Circle, the Surreal.tv team used a custom rig and GoPro camera. Justine explains that the crew had to hide and get out of the shot during every take, because all of the camera’s surroundings are part of the video. “It sees absolutely everything.”

But the fact that it captures so much is exactly the reason virtual reality is so exciting. “It’s the future of sports, the future of concerts, it’s going to be the future for a lot of people who may not be able to experience traveling, so it’s going to be cool to see how it evolves over the next five years," Justine says. She plans to apply the virtual reality concept to immersive gaming vlogs, develop interactive lifestyle videos, and even create an immersive music video for her dog (who’s a DJ). “I think as far as content goes, it’s going to be fun to take vlogging to a whole other level.”